WUHAN, China – A World Health Organization team came out of quarantine in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Thursday to begin fieldwork on an investigation mission into the origins of the Covid-19 virus.
The researchers, who were supposed to complete 14 quarantine days after arriving in China, left the hotel and boarded a bus in the middle of the afternoon.
The mission has become politically charged while China seeks to avoid blame for alleged errors in its initial response to the outbreak.
A big question is where the Chinese side will allow researchers to go and who they can talk to.
Yellow barriers blocked the hotel’s entrance, keeping the media at bay. Before the researchers boarded, workers with full protective gear could be seen carrying their luggage on the bus. The driver wore a white full-body protective suit and the researchers wore masks.
Earlier this month, former WHO official Keiji Fukuda, who is not part of the team in Wuhan, warned against the expectation of any progress, saying it could take years before any firm conclusions can be made about the origin of the virus.
“It’s been well over a year when it all started,” he said.
“A lot of the physical evidence will disappear. People’s memories are inaccurate and the physical layout of many places is likely to be different.”
Among the places that the WHO team can visit are the Huanan Seafood Market, which was linked to many of the first cases, as well as research institutes and hospitals that treated patients at the height of the outbreak.
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The mission came only after considerable disputes between the two sides, which led to a rare WHO complaint that China was taking too long to make the final arrangements. China has strongly opposed an independent investigation that it has not been able to fully control.
Although WHO was initially criticized, especially by the United States, for not being critical enough of the Chinese response, it recently accused China and other countries of moving too slowly at the beginning of the outbreak – obtaining a rare confession on the Chinese side that it could have done better.
Overall, however, China has steadfastly defended its response to the pandemic.
“WHO and global experts have given their full affirmation of the success of epidemic prevention in China and the work of tracing from earlier sources,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Wednesday. “Both sides have a basic consensus on cooperation in research related to origins, and the related work is progressing smoothly.”
Chinese authorities and state media have tried to cast doubt on whether the virus started in China. Most experts believe it came from bats, possibly from southwest China or neighboring areas in southeast Asia, before being passed on to other animals and then to humans.